The filmization of the successful author duo Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström's best-seller Three Seconds is named in Hollywood The Informer, but could nevertheless have received the title Lost in translation. Not much has survived when the novel has taken the trip across the Atlantic. Yes, basically just the surname of Commissioner Grens (the rapper / actor Common) who in this version is a young, beefy machoman with possible Mr T complex. Thus, not in the vicinity of Roslund & Hellström's sultry, aged Sjöwall-Wahlöö type whose biggest burden in life is his inexplicable craze for Siv Malmqvist songs.
Swedish, however, is the protagonist Joel Kinnaman, who makes a not entirely unequal effort as the former criminal Koslov who now works under-cover for the FBI. Koslov has infiltrated a Polish mafia organization, which controls large parts of New York's drug cops, but when an intervention goes wrong and a police is murdered, Koslov falls between a rock and a hard place. Specifically, in a high security prison where he first works for both the FBI and the Polish Mafia but then has to fight for his life.
Well, when Hollywood puts the claws in European goods you can expect some friction but here is not much that works. The intrigue is not only compressed, it is always when the book becomes a movie, rather the chop. The story picks up on well-trodden paths and the novel's intricate intriguing weave becomes the choppy action. It is predictable and basically untrustworthy, that is, even within the framework of internal logic.
It's a bit of a crime thriller, a bit of a prison movie and, above all, a lot of macho fun - that is, the worst kind of sentimentality that has lowered many good action intentions (from Fast Cash to almost everything with Ryan Gosling). You know that silent but strong hero, with a worrying wrinkle in his forehead, whose tearful love for a (passive) woman and / or child should make us understand what kind of guy is hiding under the brutal facade. Looks at least dated.
Roslund's & Hellström's publishers also suffer from the same ailment, but there it is easier to forgive as the rest of the building is stable and above all nail-biting exciting.
Well, Commissioner Grens and his supporters are worth a better fate. Perhaps the establishment will come next year in the TV series adaptation of Roslund & Hellström's trafficking thriller Box 21. A lot of it goes for it, not least the fact that Anders Roslund himself stands for the script, and that it is Mani Masserat who directs - he who debuted with fine Ciao Bella and recently made landmark fiction by the cover colleague Arne Dahl's novels.